


Hast Thou Considered the Tetrapod

by raphae11e



Category: BioShock 1 & 2 (Video Games)
Genre: (but it's still pretty gay), (that makes it sound gayer than it actually is), Alternate Universe - Canon Divergence, Bad Ending, Bad!Jack, Betrayal, Canon-Typical Violence, Character Study, Implied/Referenced Character Death, M/M, Possibly Unrequited Love, Predator/Prey
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-03-24
Updated: 2019-03-24
Packaged: 2019-11-29 05:02:24
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,621
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/18218576
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/raphae11e/pseuds/raphae11e
Summary: For the first time in his life, Jack chooses.





	Hast Thou Considered the Tetrapod

**Author's Note:**

> Anyway, I still love Bioshock with all my heart even though the fandom is moooostly dead? Catch me out here throwing Atlas/Jack fic into the ether that is the internet!!! Enjoy ♡

Jack is used to tricks of the light. He’s comforted by the sight of the ocean’s current spilled out over the ground, its shadows thin and spidery. He’s no longer unnerved by the sharp-edged flicker of dying fires and waning lamplight, nor the inky blackness they leave in their wake. He finds that he no longer misses the sun. The thought of such a fierce, burning, constant _brilliance_ makes him sick until his eyes throb with phantom pain.

Jack is not used to tricks of the mind-- or, he hadn’t been, once. He’d been terrified of Rapture, back before he’d learned to remove bullets and find his veins with a needle and scuff the soles of his wingtips so that he wouldn’t lose balance. Now, the threats of splicers mean nothing to him, and he blocks them out as easily as white noise from an old, battered radio.

Jack is trusting. Or, he _had_  been.

Now, he lies in wait in a dingy corridor of Mercury Suites. Now, he feels his nerves tingling as ADAM flows through his veins, finally settling after he’d taken his final dosage of Lot 192. There is lightning at his fingertips. Like all good tricks, his timing must be impeccable, his movement unexpected. Fleeting shadows over broken ground.

 _The splicers taught me well,_ he thinks. It’s a notion that strikes him as funny. He wishes he had one of the spider’s meathooks for the task at hand.

And then, just there-- motion. A person in the truest sense, devoid of ADAM’s aroma. The only living thing left in Rapture to be so. Their footsteps are deliberate, and Jack can almost hear the rhythm in his head: _heel, toe, heel, toe._ In this place, you are a fledgling until you have learned to move silently.

Atlas, he imagines, is more like a carrion bird. Jack has been picked clean.

He’s quite proud of the way his own gait makes no sound, even when he passes through water and watches as his shoes leave ripples in their wake. The warm weight of the wrench in his hand helps to ground him. Initially, he had considered other methods for this final repayment: buckshot, chemical burn, the venom from a thousand hornet stings. Nothing else, however, seemed _right._

Now at the center of the room, Atlas pauses. His head turns first left, then right, his shoulders tense and feet splayed. The revolver makes a sharp _click_ as it’s pressed to the meat of his palm. He must be straining to listen through the ambient noise of running water-- Rapture’s very own cleansing flood.

Above him shimmers a gauzy halo, yellow like a sickness. Jack pays it no mind; he has seen these shapes encroaching on the corners of his vision for days, until everything had become ringed in circles upon circles of needling light. He’s learned to pick his way through the radiance to find what’s real. The dark of Atlas’s hair helps to draw his focus.

He’s behind the man now. Closer, closer, almost in range. Jack’s teeth ache in his skull and his gums itch and his lungs draw in a breath and hold it, hold it. His heart is hammering against the root of his tongue. A foot or so and it will be over.

Though wiser, he is still prone to impatience. He hurries his steps and rubble _crunches_ beneath his heel.

That’s all it takes. Atlas spins around to face him and fires one shot (miss), two (hit, right shoulder). Pain crawls over Jack’s skin like insects and he hisses, thrown off balance by the impact-- but his plasmid arm is still free. With a sound like a thunderclap he throws out his hand and lightning arcs through the air.

By some incredibly cruel joke, it misses only just. Stumbling backwards, Atlas catches himself against a nearby pillar and pushes off, feet skidding beneath him, hands outstretched. He's to the entrance of the suites in mere moments, and then he's out of sight.

 _Careless,_ Jack thinks. He gnaws at the inside of his cheek until he tastes blood. He squeezes the handle of his wrench once, emphatically, and follows suit.

It hadn’t come as a surprise that half of Lot 192 would be stored in Fontaine’s apartment-- but he hadn’t expected Atlas to be based there as well, surrounded by all that luxury, waiting for Jack to arrive. All things considered, he _should_ have. It makes perfect sense, because the everyman persona is-- has _always_ been-- a ruse to hide that Atlas is-- is--

Jack makes a sound that’s all sibilance. _Nevermind._

They’ve played this game for hours now. As someone who’s lived here for years, Atlas knows Rapture as well as his own reflection-- but so does Jack. He’d been forced into a painful awareness of his own surroundings, a photographic memorization of every street, building, hallway. As he comes out from under the looming shadow of the apartments, his mind works quickly to consider his options.

All roads here lead to Apollo Square. Such an open space, with splicers congregating and Protectors searching for their lost charges, with snares laid for unsuspecting prey… it’s a death sentence. There are the sewers that snake beneath the cobblestone, but he dismisses those out of hand.

Apollo Square is a death sentence, and mistakes there could lead to either of their demises. Perhaps that’s what Atlas is banking on.

Sounds at the center of the square echo louder than elsewhere, with the ceiling stretching high above them, the supportive beams of Rapture like the ribs of some long-dead leviathan. The reverberations mask all the quieter, minute noises of breathing and footfalls. Jack grits his teeth and forces himself to quiet, quiet, _listen._

Nothing, at first. Briefly he considers the possibility that Atlas has gone even further ahead, that he’s tried to reach the bathysphere station and escape to some other part of the city-- but he soon remembers the futility of that. The bathyspheres work only for Ryan and his kin. Atlas is trapped, and Jack must die for him to be free.

Perhaps that’s something he should have considered when creating a man and raising him to kill. Perhaps, when molding Jack into his instrument, he shouldn’t have encouraged such _cruelty._

Jack edges through the mouth of the hallway and his left leg is _punched_ out from underneath him. He drops to the floor instantly with a scream cut short. Luckily, his fall had saved him from a second shot aimed at his head; Atlas had forgotten to lead his target. The new wound hurts like hell, reminds him of the shot still buried in the meat of his shoulder, but he can already feel his body working to correct the damage.

He’ll have to dig the bullets out later, teeth clenched so tightly that they’ll nearly chip. All the pain will be more than worth the result.

A third shot nearly hits him as he scrabbles forward on hands and knees, staggering to his feet as he moves. Atlas is facing him but turning away-- turning to run again. Red seeps into the corners of Jack’s vision and, surprising even himself, he reaches back to pull his pistol from his belt.

He’d wanted this moment to last, but his mind is _tired._ Not in an acute sense, but in a bone-deep way that makes him wish for everything to just finally, finally cease.

He wants to be _free._

Atlas’s eyes are wide and white in their sockets. When he pulls the trigger next, there’s a hollow _click._

“God fucking _damnit.”_ His accent is still wrong, all wrong, too _harsh._ Too _unwieldy._ Jack curls his lip in the beginnings of a snarl and lunges.

The downside to learning from the splicers is that, familiar with their movements and methods, Jack sometimes underestimates them. He hears the skittering of metal against stone over their heads and has only the briefest of seconds to register his mistake.

Jack blinks and he is on the floor once more, head ringing. A heavy weight is crushing his spine and heavy breathing fills his ears. Out of the corner of his eye, he sees a several inch-long hook embed itself in the concrete with a horrible splintering noise.

“Two for the price of one,” hisses the spider. “Pigs in a blanket.”

Somewhere nearby, Atlas screams.

Jack’s stomach clenches tight, breath wheezing out through bared teeth. _No,_ he thinks, _no, no,_ he cannot lose _this,_ too. He cannot have this taken from him. He has to choose, because anything less would be to accept his position as slave.

His knuckles scrape painfully against the ground as he curls his hands into fists. Every vertebrae feels out of place; the distinct grind of bone against bone comes from somewhere inside him, but he can’t quite pinpoint where. Muscles shaking, he locks his elbows and forces himself-- and the splicer-- up. With a twist of his torso he’s able to flip them sideways, dislodging the grasping hands fisted in his jumper, and before the splicer can react, their positions have been switched.

Hand against her chest, he thinks of lightning. The body beneath him goes ramrod straight, convulses, eyes rolling behind her mask. Jack can almost feel the moment her heart stops.

A violent, scuffling, scraping sound suddenly grows in his ears, as if he’s coming up from underwater. _Atlas,_ he thinks.

The other spider is situated in much the same way: he has the man pinned on his back instead of stomach, and straddles his chest with one hand fisted in his hair. Even in the murky lighting of Rapture’s streets, it’s easy to see the glint of a meathook buried in Atlas’s left shoulder. The stain seeping outwards looks thick and black as ink.

The other spider dies in much the same way: writhing, choking, heaving out his last breaths as the current travels through his body. He slumps to the side, lifeless.

Silence, punctuated by harsh breathing and the wet, slick slide of blood over stone. The urge to simply close his eyes and lie there threatens to smother Jack. There’s a throbbing at the hinge of his jaw that lets him know he’s pinched a nerve. His insides ache as his immune system works to soothe his pain, the adrenaline of it making him sick. His veins ache for want of ADAM.

He is _so_ _close._ The nearness of his victory is like a taste of open air, light and clear and cloudless.

In tandem, the two of them begin to move. Jack, his weapons abandoned, manages to stand halfway, hands splayed out as his balance wavers. The halos fill his vision, all but blinding him. Blood thickens in the air and he follows its metallic taste. His former companion is a dark shape before him, struggling backwards on shaky limbs.

As Jack grows closer, Atlas wraps his fingers around the hilt of the hook and pulls. The pained noise that seeps out of him is reedy and high, brittle enough for Jack to snap with his teeth. Nothing at all like his usual timbre. It’s soothing, somehow, to hear something so unfamiliar-- something that doesn’t remind him of old friendships and fresh betrayals.

Atlas tries again. This time his grip falters, but not before the hook slides nearly out of him. Just as he bites down on another agonized sound, Jack’s own hand closes around the warm metal. Removing it is easy; he does it almost tenderly, even as Atlas shakes beneath him, heart pounding against the free hand splayed over that broad, heaving chest.

Smooth as the sluice of blood, Jack slides a leg over the other man’s waist, pinning him. The meathook is a heavy weight in his hand. The body under him continues to struggle, but it’s sluggish now; Atlas stares up at him with the kind of dawning recognition that Jack has never once seen on a splicer’s face. That knowledge of one’s own morality is more akin to the terrified, pale faces of the Little Sisters, their small hands grasping at his in one final plea for sympathy.

“Jack,” Atlas says then.

It’s the first time he has ever been called by name. He does not reply, and a large part of him knows it's more out of shock than any real desire for defiance. When he clenches his fist tighter, blood flakes off against his palm and catches under his nails. There's a pain in his gut that feels like splinters and steel wool and many, many thorns.

“Jack,” Atlas says again. His voice is strained, but it's _right_ again. It's lilting soft as music. “Please.”

There's a shift beneath him as one arm lifts and fingers curl themselves around his wrist. Is it a weakness, or a bid for Jack’s own?

Now that they've both stilled, he can see the beauty he’d first admired in Atlas. The wonderful, mundane, uniqueness of him. He looks older up close than Jack had expected, with faint lines creasing his face and shadows under his eyes like the deepest of bruises, stubble framing his jaw. There’s a mole just under the left corner of his mouth. His eyes flutter shut for far longer than they should at each blink, and his lashes are long and dark enough for Jack to count them.

It hurts to see. It hurts more than the halos, than pangs of hunger or lust for ADAM-rich blood. It hurts more than anything.

Atlas says nothing. Jack almost wishes that he would.

He allows his head to fall forward, spine bowing until the stretch makes him ache. He tastes blood and smoke and whiskey as he presses their mouths together.

It's nothing like how Jack imagines a kiss ought to be. He’s too harsh, too biting, too eager to hurt; Atlas, in turn, is almost slack against him, each breath coming in shaky through his nose. Jack can feel that he's being watched, even with his own eyes squeezed tightly shut.

Just as he moves to pull away, though, there’s the brief pressure of a tongue against the seam of his lips. It feels like being struck by lightning.

They separate, and his gaze refocuses with the sudden realization that his throat has been rubbed raw. He snaps his jaw shut around the wounded noise that had been leaking out from between his teeth-- for how long, he's not sure.

Anger boils up from inside Jack for reasons he can't explain. It's quiet, too _quiet,_ and he wants Atlas to say something. He wants Atlas to talk like he used to, about the injustice of Rapture and their plans to escape and how he didn't have to worry, because they were together.

I won't leave you twisting in the wind. I won't leave you, I won't leave, I won't.

Skin tacky with sweat gives beneath his fingers as he wraps them around Atlas's neck. He can feel a pulse beat frantically against his palm, but the man hardly even tries to fight. The shape of him is wavering and watery before Jack's eyes, which only makes his halo all the more blinding, streaking out in brilliant rays as thick as paint.

Through his blurry vision, Jack thinks that he sees Atlas's mouth form the beginnings of a word. Of a phrase. But then he blinks, and his grip lessens ever so slightly, and the moment passes. A trick of the light.

He almost wishes it hadn't been.

Voice quiet and loud all at once, brittle and broken between them, Atlas speaks. “For what it's worth, kid, I'm sorry.”

Jack says nothing. He positions the hook against that vulnerable throat and bears down.


End file.
